Monthly Archives: December 2007

MLA ended yesterday, so we went to the Field Museum & Adler Planetarium in the afternoon before catching a flight back to CT.  I learned the following things: At the Field Museum, we caught the Darwin exhibit, which made us … Continue reading →

I’m not really at MLA; A is.  I’m just here to provide childcare during her paper.  But I did go to Dr. Crazy’s blogger meetup, and met another blogger the next day, and then last night had dinner with some … Continue reading →

Tonight at the grocery store, I ran into a student who mentioned casually that he was looking forward already to his spring classes.  Normally, I’m equally enthusiastic–after all, next semester’s hypothetical classes are, almost by definition, more interesting than *this* … Continue reading →

1. If your spouse makes you buy BOTH of Neil Diamond’s Christmas albums so the family can play them on the iPod, then showing her this as a countermeasure is both funny and highly efficacious in decreasing the ambient amount … Continue reading →

Just in time for the nation’s holiday travel, Stephan Pastis offers up an irrefutable moral truth: People who recline their airline seat when there’s someone sitting behind them are genuinely evil: I’ve not–yet–slammed anyone’s head into a tray table, but … Continue reading →

Students grab pictures of you off of Flickr/Facebook and turn them into backdrops for their group presentations.  Here I am as the portrait of Duncan Edgeworth’s dead wife in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head. A holiday treat for … Continue reading →

So, I’ve been looking back over the wikified notes from this semester’s Brit Lit II class (the same class mentioned here), and have discovered that apparently one of our class discussions led me to allude to this scene from Weeds, … Continue reading →

The self-evident answer to “Rex Sayer”‘s question, posed in today’s CoHE first person essay, is surely, No.  Taking care of children can be exhausting and expensive, is an excellent vector for disease (especially right now!), and, more positively, can be … Continue reading →

I’ve been working a lot with wikis over the past year or so, which has, in the main, been very successful.  In particular, I’ve been evolving a new way to do class notes, which I’ll post about here sometime soon. … Continue reading →

The New York & London-based poet Kathryn Maris, whose first book, The Book of Jobs, came out last year, was kind enough to talk with  me (for Bookslut) about that collection, her new work, and about the “hermetic co-existence” of … Continue reading →